


Mostly Mine

by lonelywalker



Category: The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Father-Daughter Relationship, M/M, POV Alternating, Parent Death, Pre-Canon, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-09
Updated: 2013-03-09
Packaged: 2017-12-04 18:31:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/713737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Sarah met Guert, Guert acquired a daughter, and Pella tried to live up to the legacies of both her parents.</p><p>Spoilers for the novel. Largely pre-canon, but with one post-canon section.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mostly Mine

Sarah had been at the party for a good ninety minutes before anyone else arrived, and two hours before anyone informed her that it was, in fact, a party. Having lived across the hall from Jeremy and Dominic for the better part of a year, she'd grown to understand that they had a wide circle of friends, most of whom seemed to live with them on at least a part-time basis. More importantly, she'd learned that they were in possession of a fully-operable washing machine. 

(This part was crucial.)

So, while she waited for her laundry to finish whirling and chugging and spinning, she sat down at the breakfast bar in their kitchen and started reading through a slightly coffee-stained GQ with Donald Trump on the cover. Although a few people wandered through from the living room, coming to retrieve beer or ice, or just looking for the bathroom, no one attempted to engage her in conversation. She was obviously just _so_ into this critically-acclaimed, intellectually-stimulating chunk of literature that to disturb her would be heinous on every civilized level.

Naturally she could have made an effort. She could have got up and grabbed a drink and some cheddar cubes on cocktail sticks and chit-chatted with all of their friends. Because she was a friend too, even if she didn't like the right music or follow whatever sports team she was supposed to follow. She was such a good friend she'd practically moved in. Well, at least until her washing was done.

Sarah looked up. This was probably a mistake, because there was a man standing by the fridge, looking in her direction, and now it seemed like she was interested. 

“Hi,” he said.

Not that she wasn't interested, strictly speaking. He was tall and dark, with nice eyes and even nicer clothes, the Windsor knot of his tie pulled a couple of inches away from his throat, the sleeves of his deep blue shirt rolled halfway up fairly impressive forearms. But still. 

“Hi,” she said, warily.

He smiled, pulling a beer bottle from the fridge. “Drink?”

“Sure, why not.” It wasn't exactly the dedication of _buying_ her a drink, but he gallantly popped the cap off for her before setting it on the bar next to Donald, and then sat on the next stool along. GQ was probably his type of magazine, which was to say he wouldn't look too wildly out of place on the cover. Maybe if he lost the beard (unless he was covering up a harelip or weak jaw). He had some pretty nice cheekbones, and definitely better hair than the current model.

He stuck out a hand – long, elegant fingers, no jewelry. “I'm Guert.”

She shook it a little uncertainly. “You're what?”

He smiled again. “Guert. It's my name. It's Dutch.”

“You're from Holland?” He didn't _sound_ like a foreigner, but then there were plenty in and around Boston, most of whom could speak English better than she could.

“Close. Wisconsin.” Guert, if that was something you could even call a person, tugged out a brown leather wallet from his back pocket and placed a business card on the magazine in front of her. There, under a Harvard crest, was the name Guert Affenlight, PhD. Department of English. She half suspected he had adopted that name simply to give him an excuse to show people that he was a Harvard guy. Then again, half the people in this apartment were Harvard guys.

He was looking at her expectantly.

“Oh. Sorry. Sarah Coowe. Doctor. Infectious diseases, MGH.” She took a swig of beer, which tasted mostly of cold. “No business card. You'll have to take my word for it.”

“Infectious diseases?” 

She was quite, quite familiar with this look of faint alarm, as if she happened to carry around ebola samples in her handbag. As if she even _had_ a handbag. “Mm. You?”

“Not too infectious at the moment, I hope.” Guert smiled. “Nineteenth century America. Literature, mainly. Philosophy. History.”

“Awesome. We have absolutely nothing in common.” Another swig. “How do you know Jeremy and Dominic?”

“I know Jeremy from the rowing club. I’m not sure who Dominic is?”

Sarah cast an arm around. She wasn’t sure what, exactly, she was indicating, but she’d decided to adopt the grandiose stylings of a tour guide nonetheless. “The roommate. Dark, Italian, does something that involves shouting at people on phones. They may be having sex, I don’t know. Should probably ask the people downstairs.”

Guert seemed impressively unimpressed by this. A rower, she thought. As pretentious as everyone else in the city, because if there was a sport you could do pretentiously, rowing was it. On the other hand, it explained the forearms and promised more. 

“So you’re not with anyone here?” he asked.

“Oh, my date is in the utility room and has been for several hours,” she said. “I live across the hall. My washer flooded four days ago and I was facing an underwear crisis. So I’m spending my day off cleaning, as usual. Don’t suppose you have a light?” She had two cigarettes remaining in the packet, which seemed like a good excuse to pull them out.

He had a lighter to match. “Thought you said you were a doctor.”

“Yeah? So are you.”

“Not the same kind of doctor.”

“But just as much of an excuse.” She let him light one cigarette, handed him the other and watched him light that too. “Guert Affenlight,” she said, looking again at the card. “Are you sure you’re not a hobbit?”

He laughed. “Certainly not. I’m far too tall.”

She would have felt strange watching him smoke, thinking – actively _thinking_ \- about his lips, his fingers, if he hadn’t been studying her with such interest too. “So you’re not with anyone either?” He had to be, what, mid-thirties, although the beard threw off her usual estimates. “Let me guess, divorced, couple of preschoolers?”

“Do I look like someone any woman would marry?”

“You know exactly what you look like, Guert Affenlight.”

His eyes brightened when he smiled. “No kids, never married, apartment full of books and not much else.”

“My my, aren’t you a catch?”

“You never know.” He breathed out smoke. “How long is your laundry going to take?”

“Might be done by now. Why, are you going to be my gallant knight, Sir Guert, and carry it home for me?”

He tapped cigarette ash into the tray. “I might hold a few doors open.”

Whether anyone noticed they left was debatable. They took the laundry with them and another beer each, and while her clothes were whizzing around in the dryer she found out what someone named Guert Affenlight might look like naked, and what he might feel like, and how he might kiss. The results were uniformly impressive: that rower’s body, and a smoker’s oral fixation that translated into prowess in that same area in bed. 

“I’m not interested in a _relationship_ , relationship,” she said to him afterward, before he could say it to her. “No romance, no falling in love, no happily ever after. But I don’t have much time to meet people and I like to get laid, and if you’re free on Friday night there’s a new movie I’d like to go to.”

“I don’t like movies.”

“Of course you don’t.”

Guert stroked a hand down her thigh, almost experimentally. “Do you like opera? I’d like to take you.”

“I have no idea. But if you’re paying, I’m yours for the evening.”

“It’s a date,” he said with a smile, and kissed her again. 

_Guert Affenlight_ , she thought. _Honestly_.

***

It had been three weeks since she’d last spoken to him and his office number was long gone from her desk, but she dialed it from memory anyway. In any case, she knew where he worked. It was hardly likely that he'd spent the past three weeks erasing every trace of his existence from Harvard, Cambridge, and the entire planet. Then again, maybe she’d devastated him so much by breaking up with him that he’d gone back to Wisconsin to milk cows…

“Hello?” 

“Guert.”

“Sarah, how are you?” He had such a lovely voice, particularly over the phone when you couldn’t be distracted by the all the various other things that were nice about him. She’d always liked the politeness too, those Mid-West manners.

She tapped her pencil against her desk. “I’m pregnant.”

Silence. At least he hadn’t said “what?” or hung up. “It’s mine?” he asked, which was still stupid, but could have been worse.

She tapped again. “He or she is mostly mine. But I think we should talk.”

“Of course.”

“Come to my apartment after work? And do try not to spend the intervening time panicking.”

“Yes,” he said. “Right.”

She would have hung up then, except… “Guert? If you try to propose to me, I will shoot you where you stand. You understand that?”

“I’ll bring pizza,” he said instead.

He and the pizza arrived two hours later, and they sat and ate, swigging orange juice instead of beer and both very much not mentioning cigarettes, which was as bad as if they were shouting about them from the rooftops. Eight months or so to go, and she was already sick of having his baby. Their baby. _Her_ baby.

Fuck.

“I’m not expecting anything from you,” she said, which was a bad start. “I mean, other than what the state and society expects from you, which involves child support, but I’m sure that won’t affect your lifestyle too badly. Otherwise, as far as I’m concerned, you can pretend the kid doesn’t even exist.”

He looked pained. Anxious. “Is that what you want?”

“If it’s what you want. I know you don’t want kids, Guert. That’s fine. I didn’t either, but I made the choice that I’m going to give it my best shot now it’s happened, so now you get to choose too.”

“Of course I want to be involved.” He looked much, much younger than thirty-seven when he said it. Over the ten months she’d known him, he’d managed to demonstrate both his impressive intellect and his equally impressive lack of emotional maturity. “As much as you’ll let me.”

“Good. Fine. So I’ll let you know about doctor’s appointments and so forth. I think the best thing is probably for her to live with me for the first few years, but when she’s old enough we can look into joint custody, holidays and weekends, that sort of thing. I’m assuming you’re not planning to leave Harvard?”

“No… It’s a she now?”

“I’m not saying ‘he or she’ for months. So. I’ll have a lawyer forward you the relevant paperwork.” 

That had been easier than she’d expected. Even so, Guert looked stunned, forlorn, a little boy weighted down by responsibility. Well, he had a few months to figure things out. She would give him a reading list. He liked reading lists.

For the remainder of her pregnancy, they saw as much of each other as they ever had while they were dating. Guert came with her to the doctor, carried her shopping, and helped her look for a new apartment, which turned out to be a lovely Kendall Square townhouse she should probably have found years ago. They spent evenings babyproofing the place, flipping through baby books from the Harvard library and discussing attitudes toward childrearing and discipline. Sometimes they went to bed together, but that was never a topic for discussion.

“Pella?” Guert said one night. He was grading papers at her new dining room table, sipping apple juice as though he could pretend it was scotch. 

She was seven months along at the time and fed up with everything. “Is that a name?”

“Do you like it?”

“I’m not sure. Where’s it from?”

“It was an ancient Greek city, the seat of kings, including Alexander the Great.” Guert turned round. “Also an ancient city in what is now Jordan. And a town founded by Dutch immigrants in Iowa. They have an annual tulip festival.”

Given that Guert had spent the past six months never once suggesting that they call the baby Ishmael, let alone Herman, Ahab, or Queequeg, Sarah generally made herself actually consider his various suggestions. “Henry”, for Thoreau, was even on her list of potential boy names, if only fifth or sixth. 

“Antiquity and tulips. Precisely what I associate with you.” She wrote it down. “I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

At some point she’d decided that the baby might as well have Guert’s surname, even though it might cause confusion in preschool, because tradition was tradition, and also because the baby would probably thank her one day for being an Affenlight rather than a Coowe. Either way, she was going to spend half her life spelling her name for people.

Guert set down his pen maybe half an hour later and came to rub her back. If she was going to marry anyone, it should probably be him. But she wasn’t, and he was dating some lawyer anyway, which was just as well. She was already having a baby with him. Marrying him might actually convince her to put herself through this again.

“I should be going,” Guert said, those long fingers resting against her belly. “I’ll come over this weekend?”

He scooped his papers and books into his briefcase, kissed her cheek, and was out the door. He was probably the only man she’d ever been certain would come back – not for her, but for the tiny little thing kicking and squirming inside her, who would soon not only be bawling all over the place, but having opinions and thinking her parents were weird and dumb and really, really uncool. 

“Pella?” she said aloud. It sounded… plausible. And at least most people could probably spell it on the first try.

Maybe this would work out after all.

***

Affenlight’s class schedule was light that semester, but the department had been keeping him busy nonetheless. Everyone knew about the unplanned, accidental, beautiful thing that was his forthcoming baby – you couldn’t check that many childcare-related books out of the library without someone noticing – but everyone also had plenty for him to do. Even approaching forty, he was the new kid on staff, the boy genius with boundless energy and imagination who could be counted on to grade papers and lead discussions and undertake research, even while he was trying to prepare _The Sperm-Squeezers_ for publication and cram for the final exam of his child’s birth – an exam that would last a lifetime and for which he would probably never receive a final grade.

It was May and the college was blooming with new flowers. Affenlight adored the New England summers, loved to get out on the Charles and feel the wind on his face. However, at present he could only see the flowers through a window, and twenty students were looking at him expectantly. The question at hand was one so utterly flawed in its bases and preconceptions that he barely knew where to start. “Okay,” he said, and smiled. “I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves…”

A shrill, insistent beeping sounded. Affenlight looked down, puzzled, before realizing it was coming from the beeper Sarah had clasped to his keychain months ago. He switched it off and checked his watch. _Now?_

The students were still looking at him. Somehow, when he’d imagined getting the call, he’d always been alone in his office or at home. His gaze settled on his TA.

“Uh, Caitlin, take over, will you? So sorry. Apparently I’m having a baby.”

For most couples, or at least for almost every two people who had inadvertently created new life, which was what he and Sarah were at this point, there would be a large and insistently helpful support system around the time of the birth. But in this case the baby would have no doting grandparents. Sarah was an only child, and Affenlight’s three older brothers were distant both geographically and socially. Knowing that they’d just joke about his dick finally working and offer to crack open a beer, he hadn’t even told them yet. Better to do so when the baby was actually born and hopefully healthy, and at the very least had a name.

Of course they had friends, but the number of friends who might be willing to pitch in for babysitting duties was close to zero, and most of the people Sarah knew were also doctors, also running around madly with beepers, shouting out code words in sterile corridors. On his generally brief and anxiety-stricken visits to the hospital, Affenlight had wondered what Harvard might be like if the English Department adopted similar conduct. Then again, given the undergraduates’ tendency to murder Melville and Hawthorne, not to mention the English language, perhaps it more keenly resembled a police station.

When he arrived, feeling woefully underprepared to either support Sarah or welcome a new life into the world, Sarah was in a hospital bed, deep in conversation with an Asian woman in a white coat. They both ignored him. Affenlight sat down and considered what he’d actually brought with him: a couple of literary journals, a packet of cigarettes, and Nietszche’s _The Birth of Tragedy_. Excellent, Guert. Way to go.

But men became fathers all the time, didn’t they? Men far younger than he, men with much less knowledge and life experience, men who had never sat up till 2am giving themselves headaches reading up on the psychological theories of child-rearing. Usually you were just supposed to be a shoulder to lean on, a hand to hold. He could hold hands and offer reassuring words with the best of them… The only problem was that Sarah didn’t seem, never really seemed, in need of his help. As he sat and watched her, half-listening to the discussion about a patient who had recently returned from a Catholic mission to Kenya, she didn’t seem to be in any pain, didn’t seem to be wracked with fear about the potential complications of childbirth or, indeed, whatever might happen after that. For a woman who had apparently never wanted children, Sarah was possibly the best person to end up in this situation, as if she’d been secretly preparing for it all along.

Affenlight, however, would have quite liked someone to hold _his_ hand. Or, failing that, a cigarette.

“Oh, and this is Guert,” Sarah said finally. The Asian doctor glanced at him in a vaguely interested way. “He’s the father.”

 _The_ father. Not _my_ anything. It wasn’t that he particularly wanted to be hers, but sometimes she made him feel like a legal footnote rather than someone she would always, now, be bound to, if not by love then at least by their shared love for another person.

He’d worried about that too, about loving the little boy or girl who finally appeared, who was finally written down on forms as belonging, in some little way, to Guert Affenlight. Of course you loved your children, whether that was in a warm, embracing way or the standoffish love of Affenlight’s own parents. But at what point did it happen? You couldn’t love a little bundle of cells in someone else’s abdomen. That would be insane, and unwise, too, given the number of potential complications at such an early stage. But what about when he’d laid in bed with Sarah, a hand on her belly while the baby kicked, marveling at the fact that he had somehow done this to her? He’d been dumbstruck certainly. Fascinated. Amazed. But he hadn’t been overcome with anything he thought he could call love.

“Are you okay?” Sarah was looking at him with polite interest: less concern for his wellbeing, he suspected, than a worry he might puke over his shoes. “You look faint.”

“I’m fine.” He did feel… something that wasn’t quite right, but what was he going to do? Go home and crawl into bed and let Sarah call him later on to say “by the way, you’re a father”? Sarah probably wouldn’t even mind. She liked having him around, but not when he was sick. Presumably she only cared for those who were sick in new and interesting ways.

As time wore on he felt better, then worse again as the hours grew later and earlier, and he hadn’t eaten anything in what seemed like days and Sarah was doing a pretty good job of crushing his hand to a pulp with each contraction. Not that he could really complain. The potential for blood and gore didn’t concern him too much – he’d watched cows give birth as a toddler, and spent much of his teenage years helping out, but when the blood belonged to a friend, or to his child…

His _child_. A pale, alien, unhappy-sounding thing when it burst out into what already seemed like a world too densely-packed, but something approaching human at Sarah’s breast: a tiny, vulnerable human he had somehow helped to form. Yet his contribution, ridiculously small, seemed even more laughable compared to whatever was transpiring between child and – exhausted, laughing – mother. Affenlight dimly felt that he should make his excuses and leave. His left hand bore four oval bruises that seemed starkly blue in the fluorescent light, and surely his part was done.

“It’s a girl,” Sarah said softly. Possibly someone else had said it before. 

A girl. A daughter. Their daughter. 

Affenlight knelt down by the bed, feeling far too big and old and scary in the presence of someone so small and new, a traveler from some other part of existence. He touched his fingertip to her cheek. She stared at him from blue eyes several shades lighter than his own. “Hello Pella,” he said. “I’m your dad.”

***

It was eight o’clock, and Pella was asleep. Affenlight poured himself a glass of scotch, added water, and picked up the next book from his stack. 

They were two months into their scheduled three-month summer together, while Sarah was off expanding the frontiers of medical science in Uganda, and after two weeks of homesickness and missing her mommy – not to mention Affenlight very much missing the peace and quiet of a child-free house – the two of them had settled into an affectionate détente. By day he let her play in the park or splash around in the pool (she loved seeing the whale on his arm underwater), or deposited her at the college kindergarten while he got some work done. At night they’d watch some inane cartoons on the TV he’d had to bring over from Sarah’s, and then he’d read her some stories and she’d fall asleep clutching a stuffed lion almost bigger than she was. 

Only a few weeks after her third birthday, he had doubts about how much she was really taking in – and certainly she didn’t mind hearing the same story five times in a row – but at least the two of them could communicate now. He’d had doubts about being left in charge of her for an entire summer too, but Sarah had told him that Pella was fully domesticated and entirely capable of finding both food and a bathroom on her own, and therefore was unlikely to starve to death in her absence. She had, however, forced Affenlight to tidy up his townhouse, locking up anything sharp or valuable. Pella’s curiosity thus far had been limited to paging through the books she found, looking for pictures. She particularly liked his old marine biology textbooks, although some of the more boring pages were livened up with the help of crayons. 

The rest of the English Department, from teenage undergraduates to wizened emeritus professors, might have found Affenlight’s sudden parental responsibilities hilarious, but they immediately took to Pella. Everyone immediately took to Pella. It must be some sort of defense mechanism for small mammals, to seem so winning that no one could possibly do them harm. Even so, Affenlight breathed a sigh of relief when he had her safely asleep in bed at night, the hazards of the day dispensed with, another day closer to Sarah returning and letting him get on with his life.

The phone rang.

Affenlight picked it up, expecting a call from a colleague or one of several sometime-girlfriends. The line buzzed. “Hello?” he said again.

“Guert Affenlight?” The man, whoever it was, pronounced his first name as if it rhymed with Kurt.

“Yes?”

“I’m calling from the State Department… I have your name listed as the next of kin for Dr. Sarah Coowe.”

That seemed reasonable, given that Sarah had no close family other than Pella, and Pella could hardly answer the phone. “Yes?” Perhaps Sarah was extending her visit. But then why not call herself? Perhaps…

“I’m very sorry to tell you this, Mr. Affenlight, but there’s been an accident…”

Later, when he finally hung up, Affenlight would look at his writing pad full of neatly-written notes, and assume he must have listened carefully and calmly to everything the official told him. In his head, though, it was nothing more than white noise and a frantic heartbeat that steadily increased in volume.

He poured himself another scotch, thought better of it, and drank it anyway, one eye on the door leading to the hallway in case a little girl in Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas scampered in to see who had called. 

_Sarah’s dead_ , he thought. He thought it again, deliberately, parsing it out in his mind. He wondered if writing it down would make it seem more real. Perhaps at some point he'd see a death certificate, an article in the newspaper, even her body, although that seemed unlikely.

He felt… numb. But _angrily_ numb, considering stabbing his thigh with the pen just to make himself react. His father's death, ten years ago now, had been a shock delivered by phone too, but his father had been old and distant, and Affenlight's three older brothers were evidently on top of everything. “I'll let you know about the funeral arrangements,” George had said. “Buck up, kiddo.” Affenlight had been left feeling less distraught than mildly offended.

Now he had no one to call. No one who would be of any immediate assistance, anyway. No one who would calmly take charge and tell him what to do. For the first time, he wished Sarah's parents were still alive – a kindly old couple who would come over and hug him and firmly persuade him to let them raise Pella. But neither of them had anyone, no one to pass the buck to. He was it. All the family Pella had this side of Madison. All the family she'd ever have until she was thinking about having kids herself. Twenty, thirty years… Or they could pack up and go back to Wisconsin. Pella might love running around the fields with her cousins. But he could hardly leave Harvard and start working for one of his brothers in the same landlocked culture-free zone where he’d spent most of the first half of his life. He could hardly do that to Pella either. Some kids would probably be content with grass and cows and more grass and more cows, but she was his daughter after all, she was his…

 _She’s mine_ , he thought dumbly.

His daughter forever, his responsibility until she turned eighteen. Fifteen more years… The responsibility felt crushing. He couldn’t just be a vaguely reasonable sort of dad anymore, showing up with toys whenever his schedule permitted. This was a 24/7 commitment, a life sentence…

Upstairs he nudged open the door of her room. It was small, but then so was she, and the light from the streets cast a faint golden glow over the sleeping form of Pella Therese Affenlight, a cartoonish lion’s head poking out from the space between her arm and the mass of coppery curls she was, by day, trying to teach her father how to braid. Half an orphan at three years old. 

Would she even remember Sarah? They had pictures, of course, maybe even some videotape somewhere, and when Pella was older she might want to read some of the research her mom had published… but Pella herself was far and away the greatest mark Sarah had left on the world. However much Sarah might kindly insist that there was a lot more Affenlight in Pella than just her name, he couldn’t help seeing a girl who, though bright and smart and adorable, looked nothing like him and everything like her mother.

He took the final sip from his glass. It was still early for him. Usually he would have hours of work ahead, or at least hours of reading, but how could he crack open a book now? Equally, how could he wake up that little girl and tell her that mommy was never coming home? Doing it in the morning wouldn’t be any less awful, but at least she’d be fully awake. Affenlight wasn’t sure she’d understand, really understand, in any case – Pella was often an unbelievably clever kid, but she was still three. Three years old. She shouldn’t be burying anyone, not even a pet hamster. 

Downstairs he made himself put the scotch away and ducked into the familiar sanctuary of his study, plucking out a very well-worn copy of The Book from a shelf full of Melville. He strongly doubted that it had much to say, plainly or in allegory, about the loss of a parent, or jeeps overturning in Uganda, or how to raise a little girl so she might be happy and healthy in five or ten or twenty years. 

Still, its opening lines were the closest thing to a mantra he knew, and the only thing like a prayer he had to hand.

***

Almost alone among the children of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Pella woke without prompting before seven on a Saturday morning and slipped silently downstairs to munch on cereal while continuing the latest novel she'd pulled inquisitively from the shelves of her dad's study. Some of the ones she tried were, despite promising covers, relentlessly dense in their nineteenth century prose, and when she flipped through twenty pages and found no dialogue whatsoever, it was usually a hint that she should surreptitiously slide it back into place and try another. Her dad usually didn't mind, so long as she kept away from the more expensive tomes on higher shelves and avoided spilling milk over his notes.

Of her dad this morning there was no sign. There rarely was, particularly on a Saturday when he didn't need to go to work. He'd been out late last night with his girlfriend, or one of his girlfriends, while Pella stayed in her room reading until she fell asleep, deliberately ignoring the existence of the babysitter downstairs. Still, when she'd woken up the blankets had been conspicuously neatly drawn up over her, and she hadn't had a book over her face, which suggested he had actually come home.

After a while, she washed out her dishes in the sink, and went to take a shower. By the time she was dressed and once more settled in an armchair with her book, there was finally evidence that there might be other people in the house. Her dad's footfall was obvious on the stairs and there were various noises as he fiddled with the espresso machine in the kitchen before he wandered into the living room, bleary-eyed as usual, in sweatpants and a gold-and-scarlet Westish Sugar Maples t-shirt that was a lot older than her. 

“Hey kiddo." He kissed her on the top of the head and sat down on the edge of the coffee table in front of her. “How's the book?”

She rubbed her nose under her reading glasses. Probably when she was older they might make her look like a professor. Right now they just made her look like a nerd. “Predictable,” she said. 

“Oh really?" He smiled. “Look at you, jaded and world-weary at the age of seven.”

“I'm not jaded _or_ world-weary.” Pella directed her gaze rather pointedly at the ceiling. “Is someone in the shower?"

Her dad looked up too. “Anita stayed over.”

Anita was a tall, elegant poet from India who was spending a year writing poetry at Harvard. Pella was generally of the opinion that you should be writing poetry in a shack by a lake, or at the top of a mountain, or maybe in your own bedroom. She wrinkled her nose. “Are we still going to the game?”

“Of course. It’s not even nine yet.”

When he came back from the kitchen he was sipping his espresso, combing his hair back with his fingers. Even Pella had to admit he could look really nice in a suit, or in slacks and a shirt, his sleeves rolled up mid-forearm with almost military crispness. He bought nice clothes and wore them well, and he had good taste when he bought her clothes too. But in the mornings he was just her dad: a rumpled, sleepy mess.

He set down his cup and plucked the book from her fingers, edging onto the too-small armchair so that she had to groan, giggle, and squirm onto his lap to avoid being crushed. “Okay,” he said, absently mussing her hair. He flipped to the front of the book. “ _The Scarlet Letter_ , really? Are you allowed to read this?”

She shrugged extravagantly. “It’s from, like, 1850. It’s not porn.”

“Shh. Don’t tell me you know what that is.” He paged back, cleared his throat, and started to read.

Pella had once loved these reading sessions with a passion. Her dad was the perfect person to read anything aloud, and he could make anything either dramatic or heartbreaking or uproariously funny depending on his particular opinion of the author’s style. She even remembered – or thought she did – him reading to her like this when she was much, much smaller and her mom was still around, hovering somewhere in the background while she attentively watched the pages, even though she couldn’t yet make any sense of them. 

Now that she could very definitely read for herself, and now that she was much, much bigger – seven, yes, but tall for her age – she was more than dimly aware of how excruciatingly embarrassing she should probably find this. But it was their time together, a shared exploration of distant worlds they’d been undertaking since probably before she could walk, and she didn’t feel like being one of those too-cool-for-school kids just yet. 

Before long, Anita came downstairs, dressed in one of those sleek, feminine pantsuits that suited her sleek, feminine body, the darkness of the fabric alleviated by a swoosh of teal silk around her neck. “Good morning Pella.” She was pinning in an earring. “Guert? I’m going to take off, okay?”

“There’s coffee.”

“Thank you, but I have to run. I’ll see you on Monday?”

“Sure.”

Pella thought for a moment that her dad was just going to let Anita go. But then he gently scooped her up off his lap, setting her feet on the floor, and got up to see Anita to the door. Pella took the book and scowled at it. It wasn’t that Anita was nasty, or even icily aloof. She just wasn’t going to be around for very long. Even if her dad had been madly in love with her – which he quite clearly wasn’t, in Pella’s experience – she was going back home in a few months, and there was no way the Affenlights were going to decamp to India.

While she was scowling, the phone rang. She picked it up. “Affenlight residence.” Sometimes her dad’s students called. She knew most of the seminar kids, and liked hearing their ideas or panicked problems. Sometimes she was even able to solve them.

There was a pause. “Ah, you must be Pella?” A man’s voice. It was a little too gruff to be a student, but she didn’t recognize it as belonging to a faculty member.

“Who’s speaking please?”

“I’m… well, I guess I’m your Uncle Frank. Is your dad around?”

Her dad was, in fact, there, taking another sip of espresso and looking at her inquisitively. She covered the mouthpiece. “Do I have an Uncle Frank?”

He seemed surprised more than anything, but there were faint lines of worry around his eyes when he took the phone from her. “Frank? Hey…”

Pella watched him comb his fingers back through his hair again and then sink back into the armchair with a soft “ _Fuck_ …” Normally she’d reprimand him for that, but she sensed it really wasn’t the time. 

“Yeah, I guess,” her dad was saying, and then he looked at her. “Pella, get me a pen please.”

She uncovered one of her notepads and a vibrantly purple pencil beneath yesterday’s _New York Times_ and handed them to him. Her dad wrote down a phone number, and then something else. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll call you. Thanks for letting me know.”

He hung up. Pella stood and waited patiently while her dad stared at the notepad. Finally, he looked up. “Your Uncle George died last night,” he said.

Pella considered this, shifting her weight from foot to foot. She never liked the idea of being like the students in her dad’s classes who clearly hadn’t read the books they were supposed to, or had but couldn’t remember anything about them. “Oh,” she said.

“He’s my brother,” her dad explained. “One of my big brothers.”

“Did I meet him?”

“No, they all live in Wisconsin. It’s difficult to take a vacation from farming. I know I’ve shown you photos though.”

“Oh,” Pella said again. “Okay.” A faint sense of dread was beginning to make itself known. “Um, what happened?”

Her dad scratched at his beard. “He had a heart attack.”

She wasn’t sure what this was, exactly, just that it was something that killed grown-ups pretty frequently and didn’t involve accidents with jeeps in a foreign land. But still. There was a pricking at the corners of her eyes that meant she was probably going to cry, and she _hated_ that, because her dad never cried, not even when he was really sad. 

“So…” He took a last sip from his espresso. “Maybe we’ll fly out there for the funeral. It’s not how I really wanted you to meet your uncles and your cousins, but… hey, come here…”

Betrayed by tears, she let him pull her back up onto his lap, her arms going around his neck as she thankfully sobbed into his shoulder: not really for Uncle George, but for the fact she’d never had the chance to meet him, for thoughts of her mom, and worries about just how far death could reach down the Affenlight family tree. 

“Pella?” her dad said softly. “What is it, sweetie?”

She sniffled. “Don’t wanna die.”

“Oh, honey.” He gave her a squeeze. “Don’t worry about that. It’s the Affenlight men who die young. The women live forever.”

It was supposed to be reassuring, she could tell that much, but it just made her refocus her worries on her dad, who wasn’t even young anymore, strictly speaking. Not that he was old, but he was over forty, which was older than Pella could sometimes really believe, and the idea of losing _him_ too was scary in so many ways that the tears welled up again and she just hung onto him with a death grip. The good thing about her dad was that he let her, even though she thought she’d probably half-strangled him by the time her sobs calmed into steady breathing and she just felt _exhausted_.

“Are we still going to the game?” she asked finally.

“Of course we are. Unless you’d rather not?”

“I want to go,” she said. It wasn’t that she liked baseball so much – she wasn’t even sure of half the rules – but she liked the festival atmosphere of the crowds, the screaming and groaning in unison, the floods of swearwords, the greasy hotdogs, the masses of people that made her half-worried she might be trampled. More than that, she liked being with her dad.

“Okay, so we’ll go.” He wiped the tear tracks away from her cheeks and kissed her on the forehead. “I love you, kiddo.”

“Love you too,” she said, and hugged him tight again.

***

“I’m still mad at him,” Pella said as they walked down a row of carefully-tended grass, not thinking too much about skeletons four or six or eight feet below, and how many more beneath them. “At both of them. I mean, how hard is it to take some pills or to remember to put the handbrake on?”

“It can be very hard, sometimes. The hardest thing in the world.”

She sighed and stopped walking, looking around for a landmark that wasn’t yet another identical gravestone. “I know. Maybe my mom wasn’t even driving. Maybe she was asleep and never knew what hit her. Maybe my dad really thought the doctors were on crack and he was absolutely fine. Maybe he was just scared to think about it. Who knows? Maybe I’m doing some really stupid thing right now and it’ll get me killed and I have no idea.”

“Probably.”

Pella glared at him in a companionable way. Owen Dunne smiled and threw an arm around her shoulders, pointing with his other hand. “Let’s look over here.”

When she’d decided to come and check out Harvard for grad school application purposes – not that she really needed to check it out – visiting her mom’s grave had seemed like the natural thing to do. “You should meet up with Owen,” Mike had said, and that had seemed like a good idea too, because Owen was in Cambridge already, finishing up his PhD, which was her dad’s old PhD – the History of American Civilization – and none of them had seen him in over a year. In retrospect, she should’ve figured that hunting down one dead parent’s grave with the lover of another dead parent would turn out to be morbid in the extreme.

Then again, it was still better than doing it on her own.

“How’s the thesis crunch?” she asked. He was about two years younger than her, and already almost a doctor. Then again, he’d never been married or spent four years in a bleak, near-suicidal depression, so there was that. 

Owen shrugged. He had a little more meat on his bones than when they’d first met, four years ago. He’d taken up rowing, her dad’s old sport, and was dating someone new, another PhD candidate in political science. Four years since her dad’s death. Things moved on.

“I’m looking forward to being finished with it. How about you?”

“Oh, it’s hardly a crunch. Just undergraduate bullshit. Hey, I think this is it…”

The gravestone seemed obscenely small now compared to her memories of coming here as a child, tightly holding onto her dad’s hand as if the dead might rise and pull her down with them. _Sarah Coowe_ , it said. _Beloved mother, colleague and friend_. Apparently they didn’t really have a word for whatever her dad had been to her mom. “Friend” didn’t quite cut it when you’d managed to have a baby together. At least, she hoped it didn’t quite cut it.

“Maybe my mom was gay too,” Pella said. “Or maybe she just really wanted a kid. Poked holes in condoms, for all I know. I didn’t know her at all. I mean, when do you actually get to know your parents? When you’re twenty, maybe, except I barely spoke to my dad after I was twelve. If I had maybe he’d have mentioned, hey, I’m in love with this guy…”

Owen squeezed her shoulder. “He wasn’t trying to keep anything from you.”

“I know.” But still… “Isn’t it scary, though, the idea you can make it to sixty and still not really know who you are? That I could turn sixty and fall for a girl, or realize I’ve got it all wrong and I really _should_ have stuck it out with David and been a painter or, I don’t know, signed up to a whaling ship or become an astronaut.”

“I think I’d be more scared at the idea that whatever I’m like now is what I’m going to be like for the rest of my life,” Owen said. “Assuming I survive the week.”

“You are no help at all.”

She took photos with her phone, not knowing when or if she’d be back, and the two of them stopped off at their old townhouse so she could gaze at it nostalgically before they found a place to sit and have coffee that wasn’t already overrun by students.

“Do you think you’ll ever have kids?” she asked him. 

He paused for a long while. The good – or bad – thing about Owen was he always took her questions seriously. “I don’t feel any biological urge for them,” he said. “But maybe, with the right partner. A lot of kids need families. I think I’d prefer to let my ideas live on through my work. I don’t think the world’s in desperate need of my genes.”

Pella had wondered to herself fairly frequently over the years why she’d never let David get her pregnant. After dropping out of high school and getting married at eighteen, a kid or two would have been the logical choice. But even when she’d barely been keeping any other aspect of her life together, she’d filled her birth control prescriptions.

Maybe in five years, if she was still with Mike, if she was healthy and financially stable, she might think about it. Mike was exactly the type who would be the world’s greatest dad. Not the well-meaning yet generally flummoxed parenting style of her own father, but the kind of man who knew exactly how to bring up kids so they were happy, confident, and outgoing. A great coach, in other words.

“You know my dad was an accident,” she said. “His brothers were all way, way older than him, so you can kind of figure. And then I was an accident too. It was weird my mom even decided to keep me. I mean, my dad’s mom you can understand, all that time ago in rural Wisconsin, but my mom was this career woman who definitely didn’t want kids… At least that’s who my dad thought she was. In any case, I’m a fabulously improbable person.”

She paused to take a gulp of coffee. “And, you know, it’s true what you said. My dad lives on in plenty of ways. People still read his book. He influenced a lot of students here and at Westish. Whatever any of us do, there’s a part of him in that. My mom, though… I guess she saved lives at the hospital, or with her research, but it doesn’t seem the same.”

“Interiority,” Owen said.

“Excuse me?”

“She saved the lives of people who might otherwise have died or been chronically sick, but she didn’t get into their heads. She didn’t change the way they thought. Guert made people look at the world differently. Some people, anyway.”

Some people: a gay teenager worried he’d never fit in, a hulking orphan who thought school was worthless, a little girl who’d worried about giant whales rising from the carpet around her bed every night, and how many others?

“Great. So how do I hope to live up to that? And don’t say I should be a doctor, or try to become my dad. You seem to have that covered, by the way.”

The smile was just a little fainter on Owen’s lips now. “You don’t have to live up to anything. Who has kids because they want them to be a concert pianist or a fighter pilot? Guert and Sarah almost certainly didn’t.”

“Hn. Yeah.” She fiddled with sugar packets. “Except if my mom had raised me I could be a totally different person. And I know my dad wasn’t happy the way things went. All I really managed to achieve was fucking things up. The last time we ever spoke it was an argument.”

She glanced up, a little anxiously, into the smoke-gray eyes behind his glasses. “Did he ever talk about me? You know… before he died?”

His hand was warm over hers. “Pella. You don’t need me to tell you how much he loved you. Guert was only ever worried about disappointing you, and I’m sure that’s true of your mom too. They both just wanted you to be you, whoever that turned out to be.”

Trite. Clichéd. Probable bullshit, given that he was just a kid, even more of a kid than she was, if either of them were really still kids at all. But it made her feel better on some level anyway, and in any case what else could she hope for from Owen, or a therapist, or anyone? Her parents were gone: her mom in a grave nearby, and her dad somewhere at the bottom of Lake Michigan. She couldn’t try to piece them together again from memories and journal articles. 

Besides, if her dad had tried to make his parents proud, he’d have become a dairy farmer or gone to veterinary school. Henry would be a small-town metalworker. Who knew if Mike or Owen would even be alive? 

“Tell me about your thesis,” Owen said. “How’s Professor Eglantine doing?”

Pella gave his hand a squeeze and let him have it back as she picked up her coffee cup and attempted to outline her research as cogently as possible. “Feminist sociopolitical letters of the American 20th century,” she said. “Judy’s being very patient with me. She hasn’t brought up my dad’s book _once_. Yeah, so there are parallels, but it’s not anything he would’ve written. This one, with all its mistakes, is very definitely mine.”

Owen very politely said nothing. Pella rolled her eyes and thought of her mom, her dad, and all those years gone by.

“Well,” she amended with half a smile. “ _Mostly_ mine.”


End file.
